Tag Archives: bottle

Oh! I just realized I’ve never shared the printable birthday party bingo game that I made for Chloe’s 3rd “Rubber Duck” birthday party! The bingo game was a hit, especially because it was easy to do with a big group and even the parents could participate. We used Chloe’s set of washable Dots and Dashes Paint, but I’ve seen real “Bingo” markers at the dollar store, too.

To play, cut out the squares on pages 1 and 2 (shown above). These are the call out cards. The caller piles the cards face-down and calls out one image at a time, allowing enough time for all players to check and see if they have a match. If they do, they mark that image on their bingo card. Once a player has found all 9 images and calls out “Bingo!,” that player wins! There are 12 unique bingo cards in all.

This is fun to play as a family, too. Just cut off the portion that says “Happy Birthday Bingo” and you’re good to go. 🙂

We like foaming hand soap in our house (see the previous post for just one of the reasons why). For kids, it’s less messy than bar soap, and it pumps out, spreads and rinses off easier than regular liquid soap. We even use it in shampoo form – more suds for the hair and less running into the eyes.

Seeing two empty pump bottles laying around made me wonder if we could re-fill them with our own home-made version. And guess what? All it takes is just a portion of liquid soap mixed with water. We filled our pump containers about an eighth full of regular liquid soap and filled them the rest of the way with water. Voila! Turns out the technology isn’t in the soap formula, but in the pump itself.

I’m so happy we discovered this. Now a bottle of regular soap lasts us so much longer, and each amount of soap costs a fraction of what it did before.

Extra fun: I peeled off the labels on our used soap pumps and gave them each a makeover. See the “before” photo here. The colorful one above is for Chloe’s bathroom and the black and white one below is for ours.

Update: Even though I used “permanent” Sharpie markers, the ink actually comes off if scraped too hard. They’d probably last longer if sprayed with a fixative. I wonder what would be a better medium? Some sort of paint?

After countless years of using old polycarbonate Nalgene bottles, we finally switched to aluminum Sigg bottles a while back after learning that our Nalgene bottles contained bisphenol-A, a hormone-disrupting chemical also known as BPA. The Sigg bottles seemed like a reasonable choice, with cool designs and a better fitting top (unlike my Nalgene that constantly dripped water out of the cap threads). The only thing I didn’t like about it was that the mouth opening was small, making it hard to clean. After a while it would develop a strange smell and seemed to make water taste musty. They do make special cleaning tablets, but I never tried them. However, I was bummed to find out recently that the epoxy lining in our Sigg bottles were actually made with BPA, too!

A few months back, David opted for a Klean Kanteen. Sleek and much easier to clean with rounded corners and no smell. More importantly, it is made with toxin-free, high quality, recyclable, food grade stainless steel. When I came across a wide-mouth version, I also made the switch (and was tempted by the kid kanteen with sippy attachment!).

For the record, both new Nalgene and new Sigg bottles are now BPA-free. Also, Sigg says that their liners have not been proven to leach BPA, but there is some controversy that they knowingly hid the fact that BPA was used at all. We knew we had the BPA version of Sigg bottles because our liners were shiny gold, purchased before Sigg recently switched to their new ivory colored “EcoCare” liner. Here’s a visual comparison, so you can check your own bottles.